Crack | What else was occurring in the United States
in the middle of the 1980s that might have engendered the
increase in youth homicide? In short, crack. The cheap, smokable
form of cocaine appeared in the major cities around 1983 and
in others over the next decade. Its low price made crack available
to millions of people who couldn't afford the powdered original
and whose life prospects made the attendant risks seem relatively
insignificant. The small quantity involved in each purchase
meant that the number of transactions constituting the market
in crack was enormous, entailing the recruitment of many thousands
of low-level employees. The labor pool for street merchants
of crack, as for its consumers, was the huge number of unemployed
or marginally employed people, especially boys and young men,
living in the economically distressed and minority-predominant
inner cities (formerly known as "ghettos") of the
U.S. Thus the trend line for drug arrests of non-white juveniles
shows a marked upturn around 1985, coincident with the burgeoning
of crack consumption.

Violence is associated with several illicit markets, including
that for drugs. Violence--or its threat--is used to enforce
contract disputes, which cannot be settled through legal institutions,
to steal product and cash from dealers, and to defend against
the latter danger. Firearms, of course, and handguns especially,
offer the greatest threat in a weapon of practicable size.
Indeed, it is in the interests of drug dealers to require
their street-level employees to go armed. Surveys and ethnographic
research indicate that young men derive both a sense of physical
security and a feeling of prowess from gun carrying. Our inner
cities provided an effectively boundless pool of customers
for crack and also of young men desirous of the money to be
made in selling it and willing to deploy violence in the process.

Diffusion and decoupling | This picture is incomplete,
however. Several surveys of students in inner-city schools
reveal that the number who carry or have carried a gun is
far greater than the number of young people who could possibly
be involved in the crack trade. Hemenway and colleagues surveyed
7th and 10th graders in two large inner-city areas. Nearly
30% of the 10th-grade boys and 23% of the 7th-grade boys reported
having carried a gun. And these figures are surely underestimates,
as the children not attending school and therefore not canvassed
in such surveys are even more likely to carry than those in
school.

The violence inherent in the crack trade appears to have
diffused outward to young people who, although not part of
the business themselves, have been sufficiently influenced
by participants, either through fear or emulation, to arm
themselves. Survey results corroborate this interpretation.
Hemenway's is representative of other surveys in finding that
the great majority of youth who have carried a gun cite fear
of other armed youth as their primary motivation for doing
so. (The interviews conducted by Wilkinson and Fagan with
young ex-convicts reveal that the "self-defense"
frequently invoked as a reason for carrying, however, covers
an array of senses of that term, from physical self-protection
to defense of one's honor.)

Two other facts about youth homicide lend support to the
notion that gun carrying has become decoupled from the crack
business. First, the homicide rate among white youth, though
always much lower than that of their black agemates, saw the
same upswing in trajectory but three years later (1988), an
expectable delay if the trend spread outward from inner cities.
Second, decoupling is clearly evident in the persistence of
the elevated rate of killing despite the decline in the crack
trade since the early 90s.

The Solutions? | Violent crime rates among blacks
and poor Hispanics in the U.S., especially the young, have
always been higher than the national average. Until the life
prospects of people in these populations attain parity with
the rest of the country, we should not expect the difference
to disappear. The amplitude of the recent spike in juvenile
killing is surprising, but which groups it has affected most
is not. Nor should we expect those youth to disarm who live
in better circumstances but have been motivated to take up
guns by fear or a status premium on the appearance of formidability.
A pragmatic, near-term strategy, given the picture presented
in Kids, Guns, and Public Policy, is to reduce the availability
of firearms to youth.

In considering the prospects for doing so, it is useful to
apply a distinction between the formal and informal markets
for firearms, drawn by Cook and Leitzel. Virtually all new
firearms enter circulation through licensed gun dealers, or
federal firearms licensees ("FFL"s). Sales by FFLs
that conform to federal, state, and local laws constitute
the formal market in guns. The informal market includes transactions
that aren't controlled by these regulations: illegal sales
by FFLs (e.g., to juveniles or felons), legal and illegal
sales by non-dealers, and gun thefts.

Formal-market approaches | It is against federal law
to sell any kind of firearm to a minor and for a minor to
possess a handgun. For this reason, the great majority of
guns in the hands of youths are derived from the informal
market rather than through purchase by the youths from FFLs.
The same applies to felons. It is estimated that 80% of guns
used in crime were not purchased by the perpetrator from a
licensed dealer. However, there are at least three reasons
not to conclude from these facts that efforts to reduce youth
access to guns through regulation of the formal market are
misdirected.

First, many people who are barred from possessing firearms
nonetheless try to acquire them from FFLs, and regulations,
though far from perfectly effective, prevent many such purchases.
The Brady Act, which requires FFLs to request background checks
on all customers wishing to buy a handgun, became effective
in February of 1994. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates
that, from the implementation of the act through June of 1996,
186,000 firearm purchases were blocked when background checks
revealed that the applicant was of a prohibited category (e.g.,
felon, fugitive, mentally ill, underage).

Second, FFLs are not equally scrupulous in observing the
regulations that are supposed to govern their operation. In
the generally relaxed federal regulatory atmosphere of the
1980s, FFLs proliferated, becoming more numerous than gas
stations. The Clinton administration directed the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to get serious about its oversight
responsibility. Apparently as a result of increased BATF scrutiny
of current and prospective dealers and an increase in the
license fee for the first three years from $30 to $200, as
required by the Brady Act, the number of FFLs has declined
by nearly half. It is likely that the prospective dealers
who are being deterred from applying or rejected and current
dealers who decline to re-apply or are rejected are not a
representative sample. Rather, they would consist disproportionately
of those wanting the license not for dealing but to procure
mail order arms for themselves and of the scofflaws among
dealers, i.e., those who are negligent about the rules. And
it is clear that a small number of dealers are the source,
whether wittingly or not, of a large fraction of guns used
in crime: half of all BATF traces of crime guns (via serial
numbers) lead back to less than 1/2 of 1% of all FFLs. In
many cases, there is no ambiguity about an FFL's knowledge
of its contribution to illegal gun possession: Until he was
caught, Jack Haynes, a dealer in Tennessee, distributed over
15,000 guns each year, altering serial numbers and otherwise
foiling the safeguards intended to make possible the tracing
of guns used in crime. It is clear, then, that vigorous enforcement
of laws governing firearms sales can limit the diversion of
guns from the formal market into the hands of youths.